"The world... ravaged... the sun beat down on the carbon stricken rock. Civilisation... a distant memory. Human-robot sex... the norm. Each day, every day, survival and ... how? this-thus."

A not too distant, distant too hot near-future.

Thursday, 24 June 2010

Nothing to see here, move along

Alpha-Alpha, as was his wont when the mood struck him, strut across the apartment floor with the satisfying staccato accompaniment of his imported Cuban heals clacking egregiously against the gratifyingly and gratuitously expensive reclaimed timber panels. Leaning towards the sill and telescope perched securely upon its generous ledge, he carefully adjusted the focal calibration with a flourish that belied a certain calculating finesse, all the while peering down the tubular aperture of the dew shield at the street below. The polarised plexiglass window situated at the phallic apex of the luxury, down-town, multi-use complex, shielding him from his subjects' mutual subjugation.

Such was the overtly practised and ever-so deliberately delivered nature of this activity, that few dared challenge its purpose; to do so would be a provocation of sorts – a challenge that could only give rise to an apparently innocent question that would, on further reflection, simultaneously impugning its target's integrity, namely: why are you looking down the wrong end of a telescope stupid?

It's seems an innocent enough question on the face of it and, indeed, quite legitimate as far goes the normal run of affairs. But then you have to take into account the context: the conspicuously opulent surroundings; the wealth and power that they represented. Alpha-Alpha didn't inherent his fortune, he accumulated it by carefully diminishing others'. And that undisguised opulence was not the accidental design of flights of fancy clashing with whimsy, rather, a carefully orchestrated ensemble that could only be the outcome of a vast symposium of auctioneers, artists, critics and scholars, which, indeed, it was. A cumulative set of pecuniary talents that, over the years, Alpha-Alpha had accumulated for himself and that had made him the perfect arbiter at said auction-cum-symposium.

So why the wrong end of the telescope? No one had ever called him out on it. And wisely so. However, QT had a theory. You see, a reverse proportional effect was achieved by the wrong-ending of the ocular stick: the people in the street below appeared smaller – antsier – and, perhaps, that was how he actually saw them, their reality in relation to his and yet, somehow, his own visual apparatus had failed to relay that essential truth to his cortex. Hence.